Fred Guillaud (b.1973, France) is a photographer, architect and teacher living in Barcelona, Spain since 2000. His urban landscapes shot exclusively on film are admired for their atmospheric banality and visual appeal. Architecture plays a major role in Fred Guillaud’s work when he judiciously projects his camera to capture transitional negative spaces often placing a small human figure categorically in his frames to give it a social context. The resulting images are bright with a limited palette, patterns, and serenity.
El Turista Permanente, Part II
In Barcelona, the city in which he has lived and captured for 15 years with the amazement of an eternal tourist, he points and shoots with acuity not only the city’s claim to architectural excellence but also the occurrences of spontaneous vistas. He uses raw materials made of walls, objects and motion to produce images in which silhouettes of a group of old ladies is superimposed on the one of a gleaming new skyscraper, in which he mixes old fashioned motifs of their dresses with elegant layout of the façade. Fortunately, the city and its members are generous with visual coincidences, whether it be in the intensity of urban flows or along the sea side, opening an entire regional capital to many photogenic recreational practices. The precise bounce of the sun on tanned bodies, the cutout of a tattoo, the repetitive geometry of creases in skin or suits, all invite themselves in the illustration of the photographer’s adoptive city.
To view more of Fred’s work please visit his website.